Bubble Glossary

This is a non-exhaustive list of some Bubble terms you may see in the Reference and Manual. Generally this will only feature terms that have Bubble-specific meanings and will not define technical terms used in their normal sense. (If you're reading through the Manual in order like a book, you may want to skip this page and just refer to it as needed.)

Action

A step that a Bubble workflow takes, i.e. the different kinds of things that workflows can do

Examples include sending an email, logging the user in, showing an element, hiding an element, etc.

A collection of Things in the database that share the same fields, which often semantically refers to a cohesive idea an app wants to represent

Slightly more technical: a collection of records with the same fields

For those familiar with spreadsheets: a data type is kind of like a single sheet in a spreadsheet file

More technical: an "object", or for those familiar with relational databases, a table

For example, for a project management app, there might be the "Project" and "Task" data types

Built-in Data Type: there is only 1 built-in data type which comes with all Bubble apps: User

Unlike Custom Data Types, Users 1) cannot be created by the "New Thing" action; 2) have some extra built-in fields like "email" and "is logged in"; and 3) can be extended with additional extra fields via connecting with a social network or oauth provider

Custom Data Type: all the other data types of an app, which an app creator creates and defines

The app creator determines which fields each Custom Data Type has (i.e. which columns exist on that table)

For example, in the dynamic expression "Current User's email:number of characters > 5", the following are all operators: "email", "number of characters", ">5"

When building a dynamic expression, the operators available at any point depends on the dynamic expression as written thus far; for example, the ":number of characters" operator makes sense when attached to some text, but not when attached to a number

A set of properties about the look-and-feel of an element that can be reused on other elements of the same type (e.g. Styles A and B can apply to any buttons in your app, Style C can apply to any text elements in your app, etc.)

These are edited via the Styles tab, and can be applied to a particular element via the Property Editor

New Bubble apps come with a default set of Styles., i.e. a default Theme (see Theme)

Styles help with consistency in the look-and-feel of an app, and if you have a large app, using Styles instead of applying custom individualized look-and-feel properties to each item could result in a performance improvement